


Unconditional Love

by sxetia



Category: Digital Devil Saga, digital devil saga 2 - Fandom
Genre: Canon Death, Emotional Abuse, Expanded Backstory, F/M, Gen, Gore, Headcanon, Manipulation, Murder, Non-fetishistic gore, Other, Unrequited, platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-21 12:06:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20693246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sxetia/pseuds/sxetia
Summary: In the Junkyard, each and every inhabitant is built from fragments of another reality -- leading to the inevitable question of where certain details came into play.





	Unconditional Love

_”You can’t just manipulate people to do whatever the hell you want!”_

The funny thing about love — infatuation, a crush, fixation, whatever one of an endless number of arbitrary terms you’d prefer to refer to it as — is that it often eclipses all else; obscures any sense of reason or logic no matter how firmly implanted within is it may be. 

Argilla _liked_ O’Brien — sure, they butted heads often enough to establish an ever-present tension between the two of them (he always _hated_ her habit of flirtation) but at the end of the day the two had built up a strong rapport, if not a _unique_ one. Argilla’s open-minded thought process and sharp wit filled in the blanks left by O’Brien’s stubborn left-brained demeanor, just as his own intuition and knack for natural understanding picked up the slack of her own (often-ditzy) observational habits. 

_”Oh, **can’t** I now…?”_

O’Brien was somebody she cared about, somebody that Argilla was always happy to see. He was her _friend._ None of that stopped her in the least from ending his life.

Her fingers trembled, all digits having gone numb and barely able to support the weight of the pistol in her hand. Bright blue irises suddenly found themselves surrounded by red as the tears came flowing, staining her cheeks with black as her makeup began to give out. At first her sense of smell was dominated by the smoky scent of gunpowder, slowly mixing in with the familiar metallic stench of blood. Her ears rang, the gunshot having deafened her — not that Argilla was capable of comprehending speech at that moment, too aghast with herself and overcome by the rush of conflicting thoughts in her head. 

All she could do was stare — for the first few seconds she silently studied the shape of O’Brien’s body beginning to crumble beneath its own weight. An amorphous crimson shape began to slowly overtake the white fabric of her victim’s clothing, centered around a ragged hole just beneath his breast pocket. He tried to suck in a breath only to gurgle and choke as his own blood began to seep from behind his lips; the bullet had lodged itself firmly between two ribs and poked a hole clear through O’Brien’s lung, dooming him to a slow, painful death by asphyxiation.

Argilla witnessed each and every one of these gruesome details with a distant enthusement, wholly able to detach herself from the situation. What made her look away was the _look_ that O’Brien gave her as he fell to his knees and processed that he’d been betrayed by his colleague, his coworker, his _friend._ Despair, anger, bewilderment, sorrow, agony… but somehow O’Brien didn’t wear even the slightest bit of malice, still holding a look of fond familiarity beyond it all. Argilla was a coward; she didn’t deserve his regard nor did she do anything to warrant any pity for her actions. It would be easy to blame it all on Sheffield, wouldn’t it…? It’d be far too convenient to say that she was _brainwashed,_ _manipulated,_ that her heart got the best of her. The fact of the matter was that Argilla _chose_ to kill in Sheffield’s name, listening to the whispers of the heart more than the shrieking of her mind. O’Brien may have been her friend, but Sheffield was so much _more_ to her than that, and her desperation to earn his favor had turned her into a murderer.

Prying eyes laid witness to her sin, and cried out to God for divine judgement. He delivered his vengeance swiftly and brutally, befitting the ruthlessness of the atrocity that had just occured.

Even if Argilla was capable of being cognizant of what exactly happened, she was too shell-shocked to process it as anything more than a sequence of sensory stimuli: a rumble from within the EGG, then a blinding white light shining from within. _”Serph…!?”_ she cried out uselessly, unable to hear her own voice on account of her self-induced tinnitus. _”Serph, w—… what’s going on!?”_ Argilla whimpered and mewled in the pandemonium of it all, managing to raise a hand to shield her eyes from the light. She stumbled backwards until her back hit steel, and she slumped against it for support. The longer that she went without an answer, the more she began to worry.

And then she heard the _roar._

Argilla had been the first to kill; it was only natural that she would be the first to die. When she lowered her hand, the only thing that she was able to make out was the towering black figure cloaked in the red light of the facility. Vaguely human, though with distended limbs and a misshapen head… and those _fangs,_ mouth wide open and ready for blood. She stared up at the monster for a few precious seconds as it crept towards her, growling and snarling like a predator closing in on its kill. Argilla could only take desperate, heavy breaths as she silently pleaded with the beast inside her head, well aware of the fact that it knew no such concept as mercy. It stared her down for a second or two, and then bared its _teeth._

It attacked with all of the efficiency of a bonafide killing machine. The blade extended from its arm in the blink of an eye, and it didn’t hesitate to make itself upon her. With a thrust of its arm it impaled Argilla through her left eye socket, embedding bone into brain and sending pulses of crimson spiraling down her cheek and onto her clothing. Her nurse’s intuition coldly, clinically listed off just _what_ her body was experiencing at the time: the blade fractured her orbital rim and sliced clearly through her eyeball, severing her optic nerve and embedding itself into her left orbital lobe. Her neurological processes began to shut down one at a time and her body spasmed and shifted, blood seeping out from both of her nostrils and further ruining her face. Satisfied with its kill, the monster retracted its blade and let Argilla’s corpse fall down to the floor below. It planted its foot onto her body as if to pin her down and prevent any escape, utterly redundant given how _efficiently_ it had ensured her death.

She’d pledged her life to Sheffield, and in the end made good on her promise: the monster grew _ravenous,_ all too enthusiastic to celebrate its first kill by engorging itself on its prey.

* * *

“‘Ey! Argilla!”

Cielo’s cries disrupted the eerie silence of the Junkyard, complementing the pitter-patter of digital rain against decaying urban landscapes. Argilla snapped herself out of the haze she had become entranced in, too deep in thought for her own good — a sniper was no good without her focus, after all. She tilted her head in the direction of her fellow Embyron member and managed a gentle smile, ever charmed by his boundless energy and unique charm. “Yeah…? What is it, Cielo?” As he was acknowledged Cielo leaned forward and flashed a toothy grin, contorting his limbs so that his hands planted firmly on his hips and his knees bent to display his investment in the topic. “I gotta question, mon’...! Where’d dat **scar** come from, eh?” He gesticulated wildly with a pointed finger, emphasizing the single unsightly blemish on Argilla’s otherwise-fair features. 

Argilla gave a puzzled look and tilted her head to the side. “A… _scar?_” she queried, to which her cohort nodded his head wildly. “Ja, mon'…! Pretty ladies shouldn’t _have_ no scars, you know? It messes with your whole look…!”

Suddenly, she remembered something for a fleeting second — a fragment of a memory just outside of her grasp, floating outside the range of fingertips and once again becoming lost to time. Argilla raised her left hand so that her fingers grazed her own cheek contemplatively just beneath her left eye; feeling at the scar as if it were her first time noticing it. She ran her fingers down her face and looked off, face blank.

“...I don’t know.”


End file.
